OK, you have had your coffee and read the news—that nonstop scary movie with a script that reads like science fiction but reflects nothing more than ordinary, everyday human behavior. Some days, like these recent days, are worse than others, and we tend to carry the headlines around with us in our heads, augmented by dopamine scrolling.
Now, however, it’s time to put down your phone, close your laptop, turn inward, and come to rest in the present moment. Observe the morning sun on the floor, the feel of the chair on your back, the sense of aliveness in the body, and the breathing, and return to what you are, always have been, and always will be: a vast space of peace beyond the news.
You are becoming simple, as simple as simple can be.
You notice the contents of your mind, the rising thoughts, and the remaining aggravation from the news. Images come and go, some staying longer than others, like your daily to-do list and a lot of random stuff.
You notice the stickiness of these thoughts and your tendency to get lost on the merry-go-round of thought. But, with sustained attention, the mind relaxes into its natural state, and you begin to recognize the space between memory and expectation.
It may not seem like much, but leaving thought alone and consciously returning to whatever is happening in the present moment is a revolutionary human act, personally, socially, and politically. It is a quantum shift in consciousness from fantasy to reality that has the potential to free us from the illusion of a single, separate self in a big universe. When we wake up to the fact that the world is in us and not us in the world, everything changes, not just for us but for everyone.
2500 years ago, the the Buddha, who was known as ‘The Great Physician’, said, ‘One moment of true presence brings more light in the world than 100 years of good works’.
As we learn the high art of detaching from ‘the news’ and returning to our present-moment experience, we may discover that there is nothing outside us. We are the world, and as the light of awareness heals us, it also heals the world.